[font color="navy" face="Verdana"]Not anymore, now that I'm a senior citizen.

When I'm feeling reclusive and quiet, I think people decide that maybe I'm just getting a bit soft in the head -- and I take full advantage of that.

Aging does have its benefits!

Yes it does :hi5:

I no longer have to dress for success and I no longer give a flying fornication what anybody else thinks about me.

I can talk a good fight in social situations so I never got the "stuck up" label.

I just need down time alone, a lot of it.

I used to be a fat white guy in TN. Then I moved to Miami and lost a lot of weight. Started working out and was in decent shape. I was certainly no stand-out or star in Miami with all of the gorgeous bodies there. Then I moved to Portland, OR. Since I had tried to live up to Miami standards for my body I was a bit ahead of most of the crowd in the Pacific NW. Not trying to be an ass. It's just a lot easier to wear a sweater here in PDX rather than have to be in a tank-top in MIA.

I went out to the bars of course. I still carried with me the shyness and the body-shame of not being as good-looking as all those other guys in Miami. So I was shy. Perhaps I put on an air of being unapproachable. That was not due to my thoughts that I'm so wonderful. It was due to my shyness and history of body-shame.

Some people certainly did assume the opposite as you suggest. Once I had a guy (Yep, I'm gay and looks are really too important in gay life) come over to me and tell me that I should stop acting like "I'm all that." That totally shocked me because I've never thought I was "All that and a bag of chips."

Yep, I'm shy. Given my past history I'm uncomfortable in some social situations. I'm actually easy to get along with though. Not "stuck up" at all.

So yes, I've run into that too.

On Edit:

Like silverweb says, aging does have its benefits. Now that I'm 30 with 20 years of added experience (aka 50) I worry a lot less about things and don't feel I have to be a hot young gay male. Well, because I'm not anymore.

Maybe because I'm a fairly big guy, no one has said it to my face ? I just have heard the "oh he/she is so stuck up" meme for so long, and I've asked people, how do you KNOW they are stuck up and NOT shy ? The answer always comes back, Oh I KNOW he/she is stuck up. I just drop the conversation at that point, because it's not worth pursuing.

If you're a big (tall and/or muscular) guy also and someone had the guts to say it to your face, then I feel doubly sorry for you !

I was pretty muscular back in the day. I wouldn't shy away from a tank-top or sleeveless shirt so I could show off my well-developed arms. LOL. What we do to preen ourselves and attract others is rather comical upon reflection.

In retrospect, I appreciate the guy telling me to not be so "stuck up." It alerted me to the fact I was portraying an image that was not at all me. My conundrum was "How do I change that perception?"

What I did to change was I started trying to engage in conversations with people at the bars rather than "stand and model" as we call it. That would be just standing at the bar, alone, surveying the crowd.

It was damned hard for an introvert like me to do that. The plus side is I met a lot of really interesting people.

Not only was I an extremely shy kid who got beaten at home, but also I didn't start learning English until I started kindergarten. It took several years to pick up and understand various terms and cultural idioms, so I was always "out of it" among my classmates. They bullied and picked on me all the way through high school.

And yet I sometimes overheard people saying I was "so stuck up."

My clueless parents were no help, and I was too shy to ask a teacher or guidance counselor for guidance.

To this day I have trouble making friends. At my age, early 60s, I no longer bother trying.

At the place where I worked before I retired, the job duties I had required me to cover a lot of ground daily, walking from one area of this public attraction to another. And getting a lot of detail work done in the daily shift. There was a staff of custodians there also who had their office/lunch area moved to a building next to the one that was 'my' office.

Most days I walked as if on a mission, and kept my head down so I didn't have to interact with the public much so as not to get held up or delayed in getting my work done. I was polite if approached by the public or employees from other departments, and did joke around and was friendly with my co-workers.

After the custodians had been working around my area for awhile, and we were all on friendly terms, one of them said to me "Wow, I always thought you were mean or unfriendly. You're really funny!" I was kind of taken aback at first, but when I thought about it, I am sure that's the impression I must have given. I just didn't want to spend time on small talk with people I didn't know, so I went about my business.